Matt Damon, Academy Award-winning actor and outspoken activist, has added standing up for teachers to his repertoire of supported causes. He currently supports many charities and foundations that work to create a better, more humane society by helping people around the world. Among the charitable organizations are: the African Children’s Choir, Ante Up for Africa, the ENOUGH Project, Feeding America, Not on Our Watch, the ONE Campaign, Save the Children, War Child, and the World Food Programme. He has proven himself to be a devoted humanitarian in a time when millions around the world suffer in many different ways.

Damon gave his support this weekend to teachers throughout the country at the Save Our Schools March. The march, held in Washington, D.C., demands "an end to the destructive policies and rhetoric that have eroded confidence in our public schools, demoralized teachers, and reduced the education of too many of our children to nothing more than test preparation,” according to the official website for the march.

The time to blame teachers for the failure of their students, and for a failing public education system, is over. It is time to recognize that the quality of education has plummeted not because the quality of teachers has plummeted, but because certain governmental policies place undue stress on teachers to forgo their individualized teaching methods in favor of a standard method of teaching to the test. The creators of the Save Our Schools March state:

“Since the passage of No Child Left Behind, schools have experienced unprecedented levels of stress and pressure as educators have narrowed curriculum, decreased the time spent on actual instruction, and even resorted to ‘gaming the system’ and cheating in order to meet the law’s stringent testing requirements. The quality of instruction has suffered as the emphasis on rewards and sanctions based on test scores has increased.”

Matt Damon gave a speech:

“I don’t know where I would be today if my teachers’ job security was based on how I performed on some standardized test. If their very survival as teachers was not based on whether I actually fell in love with the process of learning but rather if I could fill in the right bubble on a test. If they had to spend most of their time desperately drilling us and less time encouraging creativity and original ideas; less time knowing who we were, seeing our strengths and helping us realize our talents.”

He added:

“I shudder to think that these tests are being used today to control where funding goes.”

Teachers are forced to conform to certain testing standards that are supposed to measure both their students’ success and their own success as teachers, using a methodology that limits their freedom in determining how to teach a subject, and often lacking the resources to do so, due to governments unwilling to fund public education to the degree to which it needs to be funded. They are forced to bear attacks from government officials and the public who condemn teachers for belonging to unions when union membership has nothing to do with teaching, but with salaries and teachers’ rights, and are still expected to teach under the added stress and pressure of their current situation.

Matt Damon told Think Progress:

“If you look at what’s happening in the absence of unions…they’re cheaper, the people aren’t as well paid, a lot of them don’t know what they’re doing and they burn out really quickly…These punitive policies that are punishing teachers, that are blaming teachers, without ever talking about…any other possible contributing factor[s] to children’s education, and so they’re targeting the unions…

“But despite what you hear, even the union teachers are underpaid, and they’re working in really really tough conditions, oftentimes providing supplies for their own classrooms out of the little that they’re already paid, and so to break up the union to pay them less and give them less rights is definitely not the answer and that’s certainly not the way you’re going to draw people into the field of teaching.”

Many have said that privatizing education is the answer – make education a for-profit industry, and education will improve. However, charter schools are no more effective than public schools, and private schools might not be either, and therefore the only difference is cost of attendance. Public education is vital to the education of a majority of young Americans. Eliminating teachers’ unions, lowering teachers’ salaries, and thus ensuring that the best teachers leave public schools threaten that valuable education.

When teachers are underpaid, their classrooms underfunded, and their freedom to teach impeded by misguided government policies, the quality of students’ education falls. When the education of the students in this country is compromised because teachers are struggling under these conditions, the future of this country is at stake.

Public education used to be recognized as the foundation for America’s future. Let’s stop undermining the public education system, and start rebuilding that vision of educational excellence.

 

Reach Staff Columnist Cara Palmer here or follow her on Twitter.